How the Father of Claymation Lost His Company (2014) | Hacker News Reader

How the Father of Claymation Lost His Company (2014)

priceonomics.com

118 pointsallenbrunson44 comments

From a story telling perspective it surprised me that vinton animation turned into Laika after being taken over by the “evil investor” and his “good-for-nothing son”.

Laika makes amazing movies with great craft and creativity - a stark contrast to how the article tries to portrait the studio.

Knowing nothing about Laikas history, I wholly expected it to be Vinton who started Laika when I saw that name in the heading.

Another thing I found peculiar/amusing. As an investor, Knight was reluctant to invest more than five millions. As an owner he readily threw hundreds of millions i to the company.

Well, let's put it a different way. As an investor Knight was reluctant to invest more than $5m, but as a father he readily threw hundreds of millions.

> "Bob was incredibly talented, but his work ethic was non-existent"

From a story point of view, this is the guy I'm interested in knowing about. Reading to the end it appears he committed suicide in 2005. His Wikipedia is sadly brief:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Gardiner_(animator)

This is an interesting read, especially given Laika's current financial challenges:

https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2019/06/laika-splits-wit...

I love Laika movies. I love that they exist, and I love the sheer craft and effort required to make them... but I think they look _too_ good.

I think most people laypeople that see a Laika movie doesn't realize it's stop-motion. Ironically, this makes them seem less magical than they are!

It's sort of like a magic trick where the slight of hand is too good.

This is a great analogy, as it actually has a name in magic circles! It's called the Too-Perfect theory.

The idea being that some tricks are "too perfect", so the only way to do it is obvious, or the solution the audience arrives at is one which makes it look easy, and thus they don't give you (the magician) any credit for it.

It's part of why I like that for the last several Laika movies they've included a raw time elapse, including puppeteers and seams, of what was often the movie's most elaborate set piece or action sequence. But doing that at the end of the movie is its own sort of "Too Perfect" because it's after the audience already engaged with the work. If they were to find a way to open that way without derailing their stories it might set expectations better; instead of ending the film with the "flawed view", start the film with flaws showing as a form of exposition and then tighten up as things flow into the story.

I don't understand Laika, at all.

How do you spend $100m on a stop motion film?

It looks like Phil/Travis Knight are what the wrestling business calls money marks: People who love the industry thus will pump money in without any real plan.

You spend $100m on stop motion the same way a you spend $100m on any other film: paying people for their technical and artistic skills. Stop motion animation is a very time-intensive and precise art.

Or do you not understand why people would fund $100m into a stop motion film?

Probably because the financiers view stop-motion as an art worth funding. Art shouldn't need to come with financial gains to raise funding.

That's the essence of a money mark.

If you're going to go into business, go into business.

If you're going to run a charity, run a charity.

When you think you're doing one, but actually doing the other, you're going to have a bad time.

So if Phil and Travis Knight wanted to realize a stop-motion artistic vision, what do you propose they should have done but “go into business”? Are you suggesting they should have actually structured the movie studio as a non-profit?

If they were not planning to see a profit, then a non profit would be appropriate.

You ended with the same conclusion that you're arguing against

shhh don't tell him that: art is partially self contradictory anyhow

I'm not sure that's fair. Most of their reported budgets are around $60M, which is high, perhaps, but stop motion at the scale they're executing is a lot of work. And their films have consistently been critical successes -- if they've had trouble finding audiences, it's not because they're turning out mediocre schlock.

The whole story is practically a parody of being born on 3rd base.

Son's rap career - which daddy finances, including putting him up for an extended period in a Manhattan penthouse - flops.

Daddy convinces animation company that he's an investor in to hire son as an intern.

Company continues to struggle, daddy invests more and becomes controlling shareholder.

Son promoted to board of directors, despite having no management experience at all.

Son promoted to vice president.

Layoffs.

First major film release, middling at best financial results. Maybe broken even with home video sales.

Second major film release, makes less money, almost certainly lost money overall.

Third film, ditto.

Son promoted to president and CEO, also given board seat at Nike

Releases 4th film, son's directorial debut. Bombs. Likely loses ~$60-70 million dollars

Releases 5th film, massive bomb, likely loses at least $150m, possibly $200m.

Son still president and CEO. Other executives fired.

I get that, but you're carefully stepping around my point that their films are good. "Son's directorial debut," Kubo and the Two Strings, has 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and 84 ("Universal Acclaim") on Metacritic. Yeah, Travis Knight totally got his job through nepotism, but against all odds, the man is a good animator and director.

Maybe he's a lousy CEO. Maybe somebody else needs to come in and say, "Look, you people keep thinking of these films as art but the market wants Minions, so you'd better dumb this stuff down, pronto." Maybe that'd work. But I honestly think it's a shame that Laika isn't doing better.

Definitely bad at the business end; the CFO got fired after Missing Link bombed, and Netflix is in Portland now taking their talent. https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2019/06/laika-splits-wit...

It doesn’t seem so outlandish when you think of it as paying for the labor of 500 people for a year, some of them a lot, some not so much.

> How do you spend $100m on a stop motion film?

Is it hard to understand considering previous films of theirs pulled in more than $100m at the box office?

Yes.

None of their prior movies made money according to standard box office accounting, which requires a box office take of 2.5x the budget.

This is because budgets don't include advertising spending, and also the film companies actually only receive about 60-70 cents on the dollar of ticket sales.

The closest any of them came was Coraline, a 2.07x multiple. None of the rest even cleared 2x. Kubo barely even covered the actual budget.

It's like the dotcom boom era when companies were selling a $10 bag of dogfood for $7.

Movies don't only make money from the the theater. Their revenue at the theater is actually their smallest source. Back in the day it was theater < DVD sales < tv licensing.

You don't get to keep making movies if they lose money. Laikas movies have done well, even if you don't want that to be true.

That is a denial of reality. You don't get articles written saying how you're on the edge of financial doom by making money.

Denial of reality that they’ve still been in business until now? Why the hyperbole?

Blowing it in big name Hollywood actors when all you need is a decent voice actor for 5% of the price.

Nobody is going out to see a stop motion film because Hugh Jackman or Charlize Theron is in it, but someone got convinced of that somewhere along the line.

No newspaper or chat show is going to interview an unknown voice actor, no parent is going to trust an unknown voice actor won't attach themselves to some offensive rubbish but will trust Tom Hanks.

Celebrities buy you publicity and brand in a way that is hard to replicate elsewhere.

Mirroring what the sibling comment said, studios often spend almost as much on advertising as they do production. I've often heard studios "borrowing" advertising budget to pay named actors for production.

Disney's old plan was to hire past their prime actors. Starting around the 90s when Robin Williams did well for Aladdin, they started courting celebrities who are parents and want to make movies their kids can watch. Also, voice work is considered "easy" (voice actors will fight that connotation). No odd call times, make up, wardrobe, or flying to locations and staying in a hotel (Shrek had Mike Myers record some last-minute dialog inside a limo).

The Disney Renaissance and birth of DreamWorks animated studios during the 1990s and into the early aughts showed that this thinking was backwards and wrong. Commercial and critical success was built upon hiring big name Hollywood actors to lend their voices.

And some of them were exceptionally talented, like Robin Williams or Michael Meyers. Others, like Eddie Murphy, Gilbert Gottfried, Cameron Diaz - they were hired for their voice and their name on the billing. And it worked, it still works, and major productions today don't throw $100 million at a project without stars attached. That'd be crazy.

As a counterpoint I'd argue that these movies are usually also successful in countries where they are screened in non-English. Those voice actors are usually unknown to the general audience (one could argue that they are often the associated voice for the given big name actor but that's not always the case).

At least in Germany, animated movies are rarely advertised as "featuring X" whereas in the U.S. I saw the names of the voices in advertisements.

All of the people you listed have recognizable voices with a history in comedy and they were performing comedy roles in their respective animated films.

Just picking big name actors for a cartoon won't really do much. Everybody knows Tom Cruise by his performances on screen, but people probably won't be throwing down $15 to hear him as a talking donkey like they would with Eddie Murphy.

That only works for English speaking viewers.

I couldn't care less who voiced the Spanish version of the genie, and animated movies are huge internationally.

Big Name actors will be changing less for Voice work than a Major film tho

Post processing make up some of the costs. Many of the shots in Kubo, for example, have incomplete sets and are filmed in front of green screens. These need to be composited together with a CG set and backdrop.

That still doesn't really explain it.

Fantastic Mr. Fox was made for $40m and had AT LEAST the calibre of cast that any of the Laika films have had.

The caliber is completely subjective, and Fantastic Mr. Fox made 1.16x box office / budget, so total flop. I’m not sure I understand how the fact that a different film that flopped made 10 years ago by a different company has a different budget demonstrates anything at all?

Lots of good films are made for less money, and lots of bad films are made for more money. Many many movies lose money. That’s the reality of movie making, it’s risky. Many many businesses lose money, those are also risky. That’s the extent of what you’re arguing here. If you really want to understand how easy it is to spend a lot of money and lose it, all you need to do is make a movie or start your own company, and witness first hand how good ideas and business plans that seem strong at the time fail to make returns.

It’s not weird or hard to understand when big projects lose money. It’s weird when they make money.

Fantastic Mr. Fox was mostly 12fps. The Laika films I've seen were mostly 24fps.

Every AI neural net startup, from the glossy executive summary brochure,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoBmlbQApJE&t=3m40s

"Thank you for turning me on, I am a replica of the Model 505-fied P-Electro Brain equipped with quasi-empirical input which has proved infallible in advancing reasoning quotients far and above that of my inferior humanoid creators. Now that you have activated my energy cells I will proceed to carry out the infinite mutations for which I was programmed... I am a rep-rep-replica rep-bot-bot-short short short-circuit short-short short program does not know short short compute correct error key mutant mutant mutations mutations metaphrorlogical mutations mutations of universal comparitive mutations mutations metaphorphology quotiental program quotient as the as the... as the world turns six o'clock news that's the way it is mutations mutations metaphorlogical mutations my resistors are resistors reiteresistors mutant mutant metaphorlogical mutations mutations muant mut mut mut mut mut....."

"Blabbermouth computer!!!"

meta: i submitted this story a couple of years ago, but it didn’t get any traction. i was invited by the mods to resubmit it, and this time it did a little better. never thought i would be part of the “second chance pool” i have heard so much about. this motivates me to find and submit other things i think are interesting.

It was an all around awesome read, thank you for that find. I believe articles like this often just get overlooked because of timing or other factors.

Tragic that he lost his company, but at least he got the artistic recognition. Sadly, Vinton died in the meantime.

Meta here: I wish I had seen your submission the first time. Reading this just now, half the embeds are broken.

Is link rot accelerating?

A heartwarming story of the American Dream being fulfilled once again.

TL;DR: VC-driven hiring expansion to deliver someone else's project can melt your company.

Also, the easiest way to be a successful businessman is to have a very successful businessman for a father.

I've often noticed how a founder even with millions of dollars in cash flow may not have started with any investment of other people's money, but also may not be in a situation where they can offer any of their own money as an investment in someone else's venture either.

So there's not much pure capitalism involved, financial focus is on well overcoming the cost of doing business by making money pleasing customers.

Lots of successful entrepreneurs are like this.

OTOH, a suitable venture capitalist is expected to have much greater resources first of all, intended to be put to work symbiotically where the investment leverages the founder's corporation, and the corporation thereby makes better returns for the capitalist than could generally be obtained in public markets.

The more pure the capitalist component, the more purely the financial focus can be simply on returns of some form.

Lots of succesful capitalists are like this.

And both can get together in a way which everybody wins.

Probably ideal if the inherent imbalance of strength/resources can be compensated for to make sure of it.

If the capitalist is so overwhelmingly strong and therefore more powerful, the founder might as well not consider themself a capitalist at all by comparison.

Both seem to prosper well when the capitalist not only wants healthy returns but truly also wants the founder to grow into a stronger capitalist themself, and makes it real.

That way both can focus on the retuns from a similar perspective.

Without that there's more chance of returns being made through cannibalistic activity if one beast is much bigger and gets hungry, and the way smaller species has no effective defense.

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